Dublin airport ‘crippled by flakey network card’

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From The Register…

An air traffic control fault that brought Dublin airport to its knees last week has been traced to an intermittently flakey network card.

Sadly, while the problem was simple enough to diagnose, it’ll be weeks before the airport’s air traffic control system will be able to run at full capacity.

The system went for a little lie down last Wednesday, and while it was back up and running soon enough concerns over its capacity meant authorities had to slash the number of flights in and out of the airport.

It wasn’t until Wednesday that the Irish Aviation Authority was prepared to say “operations at Dublin Airport are now generally meeting demand” though “some minor delays may be experienced at peak times”.

Thales ATM, the makers of Dublin’s ATC system, conducted a review of the system, and after crawling around the airport with their little torches, “confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy”. The flakey card had been responsible for previous problems since June 2.

Apparently, Thales ATM stated ”that in ten similar Air Traffic Control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported”.

So, problem solved? Er, sadly not. The IAA has slapped in further monitoring tools, and plans “an enhancement” to the failure recovery system. But whatever happens, the system will need to be revalidated, which could take weeks. In the meantime, it will “slowly add capacity“, but for safety reasons “will not operate the system to its limit until the system has been re-validated”.

The Irish Times ran several pieces on the ensuing chaos, including this one which, en passant, contained a gem of a quote from RyanAir’s CEO.

Another contentious issue for passengers and airlines is compensation. Under European consumer regulations, passengers must be offered help free of charge while awaiting a rerouted flight, with meals, accommodation if necessary, transport between the airport and accommodation and telephone calls provided. But some airlines resent having to reimburse the cost of disruption which was not their fault. When asked yesterday about his passengers’ complaints that they weren’t offered the courtesy of a cup of a tea or a taxi fare to their hotel, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said: “Personally, I think that’s a load of nonsense. You paid an airfare of €40. You saved around €150. Buy your own cup of tea . . . Why are we providing cups of tea because the IAA can’t run a radar system properly?”

Cloud computing terminals worry the PC industry

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And so they should. The PC is being commoditized. This from today’s New York Times.

SAN FRANCISCO — The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices. Curiously, some of the biggest companies in the business consider this bad news.

In a tale of sales success breeding resentment, computer companies are wary of the new breed of computers because their low price could threaten PC makers’ already thin profit margins.

The new computers, often called netbooks, have scant onboard memory. They use energy-sipping computer chips. They are intended largely for surfing Web sites and checking e-mail. The price is small too, with some selling for as little as $300.

The companies that pioneered the category were small too, like Asus and Everex, both of Taiwan…

What’s strange is that anyone should be surprised by this. It’s been obvious for years that this is what would happen. Outside of the luxury markets, a technology is always commoditized if there’s sufficient demand for what it offers or provides.

Robotic panoramas

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Hmmm… I’d like to try one of these…

A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas — whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.

Viewers can explore a panorama in detail when it is displayed on a computer screen, clicking on any part of the image and then zooming in for crisp close-ups. You can move from an overall shot of the forest, for instance, to an image of one small moth resting on the side of a single tree trunk.

Examples here. They’re claiming a price under $500 for the production model. It’ll sell.

On this day…

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… in 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.

Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link to the background on how this image was ‘prepared’ for publication.

It was taken with that famous Hasselblad that they left behind (to save weight). According to this source it was a special version of the 500 EL strapped to the astronaut’s chest (and without a viewfinder). The film was a variant of Ektachrome 160.

Say ‘Cheese!’ for Google

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This morning’s Observer column — about Google Street View…

In a way the issue is not whether this Google innovation is permitted or not, but the general direction we’re headed and the role Google might play in our collective future. Last week I wrote about the legal ruling which compelled Google to hand over to Viacom its computer logs of every single viewing of a YouTube video, including those by UK residents. The privacy implications of that ruling have since been mitigated by agreement that the data can be ‘anonymised’ by Google before handover. But, again, the direction is towards a world in which everything we do is monitored and logged – mostly by one company.

Google’s mission, according to its corporate website, is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. What we perhaps haven’t fully realised is that these guys really mean it. Their ambition is at least as megalomaniacal as Bill Gates’s vision of a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. So it’s time we started thinking about what a world dominated by Google would be like. As it happens, some people have – and they’ve been publishing the results on YouTube. Have a look — and then pour yourself a stiff drink.

Obama’s State Department

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The New York Times claims that Obama has a huge foreign policy back-up team.

Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a briefing on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a set of questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate is likely to be asked about international relations during the day.

One recent Q. & A. asked, for example, whether Mr. Obama supported the decision by Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to include a timetable for American troop withdrawal in any new security agreements with the United States. The answer, provided to Mr. Obama with bullet points, was yes — or “a genuine opportunity,” as he put it in a speech on Iraq this week.

Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters…

No wonder he needs to raise $50m a month.

The financial crisis, US-style

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Plain speaking from this week’s Economist.com

Capitalism rests on a clear principle: those who get the profits should take the pain. For the system to work, bankers sometimes need to lose their jobs and investors their shirts. Yet were a collapsing Bear Stearns or Fannie Mae to sow destruction for the sake of a principle, it would impose a terrible price in lost jobs and output on everyone else. The unpalatable truth is that by the time a financial crisis hits, the state often has to compromise—to impose as much pain as it can, of course, but to shoulder a large part of the losses nonetheless.

That formula comes at a heavy price. Fannie and Freddie were supposed to help Americans buy their own homes, by making the mortgage market work better. But it has been an awful deal for the taxpayer—a Fed economist calculated the implicit debt-guarantee was worth a one-off sum of between $122 billion and $182 billion. Because Fannie and Freddie barely lowered the cost of borrowing, little of this subsidy went towards boosting home ownership. Instead, just over half—about $79 billion—went straight to their shareholders.

Normal financial-services firms should have been dealing in the safe, middle-of-the road mortgages that Fannie and Freddie specialise in. Except that they were crowded out into subprime mortgages. Fannie and Freddie should never have grown so large. Except that they wanted to exploit the margin between the government-guaranteed borrowing costs and the commercial lending income. They should have been stopped by Congress and their regulator. Except that they spent some of their subsidy on a fierce lobbying machine.

Which is how we wind up with a system in which profits are privatised and losses are nationalised.